and it burns burns burns

At Hope Lodge, where we stayed in New York, Healing Touch is on offer every Thursday for cancer patients and caregivers. If we had stayed that long, I would have signed up. My only experience prior to our stay was when I had a nasty pinched nerve just beneath my right shoulder blade a couple of years ago. I went to work that morning holding myself rigid; every time I sneezed or laughed it hurt something awful. My colleague Bernadette, a psychotherapist and Healing Touch practitioner, noticed I was moving strangely and asked what was wrong.

Now, I must tell you, I'm sort of a funny case. I'm a chronic hanger-around-the-fringes of yoga communities and other places where people talk with conviction about chakras and energy fields. I'm genuinely fascinated by all kinds of work that integrates touch, movement and breath into holistic healing. I believe in the importance of quiet, intentional laying on of hands. I crave it when I am hurt - actually I yearn for hugs and physical contact most of the time - see twelve a day. But I've never really been a Believer. I'm more of a Dabbler, a Willing Participant. I always maintain a bit of distance; I want the freedom to make a joke about wacky mystical bullshit. Especially when people start getting preachy.

Bernadette asked me to show her the place that hurt. I pointed. She placed her hand gently on my back and we were quiet together for maybe a minute (this was while other clinicians trickled into the room for a staff meeting about to begin). She took her hand off my back and looked at me quietly. I thought: that's it? It still hurts, lady. You were supposed to fix me up in the two minutes we had between our last client and this meeting. What about that healing mojo?

Honey, she finally said, you're holding your breath so that you can avoid feeling the pain, but that's making it worse. When we feel pain, something is calling for our attention. You can't avoid it. You have to breathe right into the place that hurts.

Oh. Right. Despite its obvious appeal, avoiding pain isn't usually a good strategy. I depend on the wisdom of other people to help me remember.

She was totally right and after a few excruciating breaths my back felt better. The pain was completely resolved by the afternoon.

This morning Beatrice was dragging her feet and telling all of us that she didn't want to go to school. She flopped onto the floor and cried when I tried to help her get dressed. She refused to open her mouth when she saw the toothbrush approach.

Finally she mentioned a fire drill. She didn't want to do the fire drill today. It might be scary. Aha. So Gabriel patiently told her all about fire drills. Mike told her there would be no fire as I slid her arms into her rain jacket - even though it's called a fire drill.

She was only slightly reassured, and kept crying on and off all the way to the car. We said goodbye to Frances and Gabriel and with mounting irritation (enough with the fire drill business, good lord) I sighed and looked back at buckled up Beatrice in the mirror. And when I saw her face, I felt my heart, of its own accord, drop heavily in my chest, freighted with love for her.

We watched an old episode of Mr. Rogers recently, during which I listened to the dialogue between two characters in the world of make believe with near-bewilderment. Lady Aviland articulated Daniel Tiger's worry, whatever it was, again and again, mirroring it slowly back to him, giving language to his fear with a kind of patience normally associated with sainthood. Maybe kids need a long time to transfer a worry from the inside to the outside, from feelings to words.

Would you like to snuggle and talk about your worries? I asked. She said yes. We settled in to hang out in the back of the minivan with the doors open to the cool rainy air.

Okay. What are you worried might happen today?

I am worried that my body will be in flames. I am worried that my friends will have burns. I am afraid of a fire truck being pretend but then turning real and coming to my school and there being a fire. I am afraid we won't be able to leave without touching the flames and getting burned. I am afraid firemen will have a truck that makes loud noises and I think someone will be hurt.

Did you catch that first worry? That her body will be in flames?

We had to go right to the source of fear. I had to stop trying to shake off her worry, and rather breathe into the pain with her. We talked about why schools have fire drills, how fires very rarely happen but it's good to know how to be safe just in case, how no one will have a burn today or have to touch flames. She had to keep telling me about the images in her mind that were truly terror-inducing, over and over.

Sometimes clients tell me they don't want to talk about their depression, because that will only make it worse. If they pay attention to it, it will probably get bigger and bigger and become overwhelming.

It is counter-intuitive, really, that the opposite is almost always the case.

Beatrice agreed, after our talk, to walk into school with me. She had a perceptibly lighter step. She  ran right into her classroom and greeted her friends with contagious enthusiasm. Magic.

I left thinking about her, about the hugeness of her worries and how she was able to let them go.

I remember the midwife's face hovering over mine during Frances's birth, how she firmly and humorlessly informed me that it was time to stop shrieking, Meagan. Stop avoiding. Vocalize much deeper. Prepare to go through the Ring of Fire.

Mike just barely managed to stop himself from singing the little horn riff from Johnny Cash's song of the same title. It wasn't the time, he says.

I doubt I would have noticed anyway. Sometimes shrieking and hesitating seems so much better than heading into the fire. Oh Beatrice! Maybe sometimes we do have to enter flames, in order to pass through and out of our pain.

After I dropped her off I went to a yoga class with a teacher I admire. She was teaching a series of classes on the different chakra centers and today's was, what do you know, the yellow-hued, fire-associated third chakra.

When I left class, all cleansed by the heat of yoga practice, I walked to my car, parked further down the street. Just as I was getting in I heard sirens approach. I slid in quickly and shut the door to be sure I was out of their way. My heart racing, I counted three fire trucks and then three more fire vehicles scream past me.

I couldn't help myself. Frightened, I drove by the New School, steeling myself to leap through flames to save my kids. Just in case the firefighters needed some help.

But all was quiet, cool, and rainy: a perfect day for a fire drill.

every moment

Enjoy every moment. Savor it all. Carpe diem!!

Thus were we exhorted when I shared that Mike and I had decided to take the kids out of school and head off to a nearby state park for a midweek mini family vacation. We wanted to go away together before Mike begins a new clinical trial in New York next Monday. This treatment's goal is to get his cancer into remission so that he can safely have a stem cell transplant (read: many potentially harrowing months ahead for my family). His cancer has the worst timing, and we've had to cancel woodsy mountain idylls over two consecutive summers. So this was the first time we'd had a real family vacation in well over two years.

But just two days? Well then, squeeze as much delight and family love and adventure in as you can! 

The problem with "enjoy every moment" is that we are still ourselves and, related to this, life simply isn't enjoyable all the time, even on vacation, even when you really appreciate being able to go at all. It's a bit of pressure, isn't it? Enjoy every minute! 

Now, I know that everyone who expressed this sentiment did it with a loving heart and sincere happiness that we were finally going to get a goddamn break. I recently read an Anne Lamott essay about a family with whom she is very close. Their two year old has cystic fibrosis. She describes the time before and after diagnosis, when they made the irreversible journey from the universe of normal, sometimes-pleasant-sometimes-stressful family life to the Land of the Fucked. 

Boy did that make me laugh. Ah, yes. The Land of the Fucked! I know it well.  

And people who love us can see us bumbling around in this uncertain, treacherous territory from out there, where most of them live, in the more predictable world of work and kids and family and vacations. So when we shared that we had found a temporary exit door and were going to return to where families take vacations (the midweek, September nature of it belied our continued alien status, but still), our friends and family celebrated this triumph with us. And they wanted us to have some Serious Fun, to take the edge off life in the valley of the shadow of death and squeeze all the pleasures there were to be had out of forty eight hours in French Creek State Park.

Let me make a confession. Within the past week I've told not one but two friends to enjoy every minute of their upcoming adventuresome international vacations. I know now that when I said it, some meanness and aggression were behind the sentiment. I think I felt resentful and small and stuck in the Land of the Fucked. You know about Mike's cancer, right? You know that we can't plan more than three days in advance ever, right? So enjoy your trip. Some of us don't go on trips. But you do, like, all the time, and if you waste it with fights over where to go for dinner or space out and forget to appreciate all the amazing architecture, it will be a moral failing and an offense to every last denizen who shares my new address.  

Anyway. I'm a little ashamed about that. I'm sorry. My heart shrinks sometimes. 

So back to our trip: people I love are telling me to savor savor savor, and I'm making a packing list and looking for sheets that will fit the cabin bunk beds and a bigger cooler and glancing at the confusing directions and the time is growing short and I might not get to run before we pick up the kids at school and go, not to mention it's still raining, and I'm wondering why I have to do everything around here anyway, and I am feeling very irritable. 

Enjoy every minute. Right. So far, not so much. But we made it there, and despite the drippy weather the children were all delighted by the cabin and proceeded to leap off the bunk beds over and over, to break the place in. It was too wet to make a campfire so the older kids held marshmallows over matches to set them on fire, and Beatrice and I snuck into the cabin and used the microwave to blow up our marshmallows and make them squishy. Mike sighed in disappointment at our quickness to turn to modern conveniences in the middle of the woods. Voila! S'mores! We're on vacation!

Beatrice, who has moved too many times and faced too much uncertainty for a three year old to comfortably process, began to melt down right and left, every time she asked for something (a book, a snack, a toy) that I hadn't brought with us. I finally figured out that she thought we were moving to this little cabin in a state park permanently. New house #5. The bunk beds are nice and all Mama, but you didn't even bring a box of crackers! We are lost!

We all reassured her, we all sympathized, and we all got annoyed, too. We suggested she retreat into the bunk bed room to cry, so we could properly enjoy our microwaved marshmallows and the peace of the woods. That didn't really fly.

The next day the rain had stopped and we went hiking. Beatrice protested wildly. Initially Frances and I took turns giving her piggy back rides and reminding her not to choke us. Mike felt tired. We discovered that the Boone Trail I had chosen was actually 6 miles, not .6 miles.

I remembered that I get annoyed at my husband when we travel. I remembered that hiking with a three year old is pretty touch-and-go. I tried to accept these things, take a deep breath, and notice the riotous beauty everywhere I turned instead.

And I did. And you would have seen it too. The woods in September in Pennsylvania, if you can put your own enjoyment-shortcomings aside, are spectacular. Yellow leaves drifted down continuously through the stands of trees, and the smell of earthy wet decomposition was pervasive, an additional transparent color layered over everything. We were present on the brilliant cusp of autumn, when the summer is at its wettest, richest, greenest height, just beginning the tip and slide into a time of warm autumn colors, of greater stillness, of death.  

Beatrice decided she wasn't too scared or tired after all, and that she'd rather walk. It was fun, because there was so much to see on the forest floor, including little adorable toads. Gabriel is our most gifted observer of the natural world, and he led the effort to spot these charming little guys. By the end, it was a thirteen toad hike.

And things continued from there. We were still our anxiety-riddled raw-edged selves, but we began to relax into this new space with greater harmony. We skipped (and hurled) rocks at the lake. We ate a lot of sweets. We played cards, and drew pictures, and some of us spent hours futilely working on a campfire, watching it spark to life momentarily only to hear the wood begin to hiss, a harbinger of fire failure. Too wet. But such heroic efforts! Mike and Gabriel definitely made some smoke, and eventually humor, the absurd and ticklish kind that sometimes, thanks to grace, comes with big disappointments. We giggled helplessly about the doomed campfire. We lit paper plates. We sang songs around the ashy firepit in awful rounds and I snuck back to the microwave to make another squishy marshmallow for Bea.

The next day was even better. The morning hike was glorious, peaceful. We didn't see another soul on the trail - just us, walking a carpet of soggy leaves with those elegant trees overhead, the smooth  lichen-covered rocks, some caterpillars and spindly daddy long legs, brilliant springy moss, a toad or two, occasional splashes of sunshine. You had to give in. You just couldn't help but enjoy it.

It was a good vacation.

 

And I've been thinking about this. It isn't reasonable to expect a family of human beings (especially the one you are a part of) to enjoy every moment. But you might aspire to accept every moment. 

To try to be present for at least most of the moments. To resist running away from the moments, even when the little one lies down on the trail and wails, or when the almost-teenager shrieks about the lack of privacy. 

Don't run away from the moments when you feel yourself shaking with anger or heavy with unbearable sadness. Because those too are gifts. Take it from me, a citizen of the Land of the Fucked, a stark place where everything gets stripped away. See through this rawness. In my post-vacation, heart-healed state, I now speak not with judgement but rather gentleness: if you can, set aside the expectation. Instead accept every moment, that your heart might open wider and wider still, that love might scour you out, and fill you up.

everything shared is better

Yesterday was the first day of Sunday School. Frances shrugged me off on her way to the middle school group. I walked Gabriel downstairs to his new classroom where he shot me one of his heavy-lidded, evil eye looks as I lingered in the doorway. It meant get out of here Mama, it's bad enough as it is without you embarrassing me. As I headed back towards the hallway with Beatrice, we passed an open doorway and a very nice woman called out to us. 

Are you coming to Sunday School, Beatrice? 

I hadn't realized she was old enough this year. We peeked in and saw a bunch of blonde heads bent over pieces of white paper at a small table, chunky broken crayons in use. I helped Beatrice pull up a chair and find some supplies, then leaned over to hug her from behind. 

She knew my intentions. She turned around in her plastic chair and clung to my neck like her life depended on it. 

You can't go, Mama! You have to stay with me! 

[Incidentally, I really do feel as if my kids are either pissed at me for staying or pissed at me for going most of the time; sometimes the same kid is harboring both feelings simultaneously. An impossible position.]

She could tolerate detaching herself physically but would not allow me to inch more than a foot or two away. So I stayed. A little boy who had a tiny row of stitches visible within a yellowing bruise along his hairline also refused to let his dad leave the room. We were two parents, two teachers, and six children between the ages of three and five in a basement classroom. There were shelves with simple storytelling props (wooden sheep, figures, pieces of colorful felt), and a model of Jerusalem that you weren't supposed to play with because the city walls were not staying together very well anymore, and a bulletin board with a single child's art on it. Someone named Bella. 

I knew I had to go home to pick up Mike before church started. I really wanted a cup of coffee in the parish hall. 

When everyone had gathered on the red rug in the center of the room, the kind, bright-eyed teacher greeted each child one at a time. She told them what they would be learning about and playing with and making in their class. Then she said, Did you all have a good summer? Did you have any adventures?

I hate this moment. A well-meaning adult smiles at one of my kids and says, "did you have a great summer?"

That suggests the norm is to have a great summer. Kids are supposed to have fun over the summer, and come September they are supposed to be happy to share with their teachers and friends all about their fun summers. Kids aren't supposed to have moved houses twice, to have sent their papa off to the hospital for a week at a time, to watch his hair fall out, to cancel vacation plans and visits with friends, to worry about their parents. And while our big kids did squeeze in some classic summer fun off with friends and grandparents, Beatrice is too young to be away from us. Her summer was, unavoidably, dominated by cancer and its repercussions. 

So when all the other children had shared about their favorite rides at Dutch Wonderland and how their daddy can jump higher than the biggest wave (how I wanted to muzzle that sweet boy), the teacher turned to Beatrice. 

Did you have a vacation this summer too?

Beatrice was quiet for a moment, knees to her chest, holding onto her shoes. I studied the shiny linoleum framing the carpet, harsh and bright where the fluorescent lights above were reflected. I bit my lip. Then I watched her dear face. 

Well...we are going to go to Massachusetts for a summer vacation, I think.

Massachusetts! exclaimed the teacher. Do you know where you went in Massachusetts?

Well, I know they have swimming holes there. And trails in some big forests. And mountains called the Berkshires are in Massachusetts.

The Berkshires! Beatrice. That's a big word.

It took all I had not to cry, and then a little bit more not to snatch her up and run out of there. Does she think we still haven't had our summer vacation? She knows Frances and Gabriel went with Gramma for a short version of it, while we stayed home. Or did she know that there were no vacations this summer, and why, and she was just trying to please the teacher with an acceptable response? Or be like the other kids with mommies and daddies and trips to the beach?

I wish we had gone to the Berkshires. I wish when adults asked my kids about their summers, they didn't have to hesitate and wonder what to say.

About a week ago, sitting on another red patterned rug, I told Heather and Mike about how when I read the Little House books aloud to Frances and Gabriel years ago, I would marvel at Ma. How she kept track of the days, how she and Pa would drag in ice to melt over the wood stove in a metal washtub to bathe their girls all the long winter, how she would enforce quiet and study on Sundays. What a drag it must have been sometimes. What a ceaseless effort, creating civilization for her family, beating back the chaos and dirt and lassitude that must have always threatened to destroy their tenuous stability. To my ears some of it sounded downright crazy. Ma! Did you really grate carrots and squeeze the juice into your cream so that your butter would cast a pleasing yellow glow? Wouldn't you have liked to sit down for just one minute instead?

But she really couldn't have. She had to do those things. Her family depended on her to insist upon the importance of doing more than just survive - to rather create beauty and peace and discipline, way out in the wilderness.

I feel like her now. I make them practice the piano, and speak to me respectfully, and brush their teeth, and clear the table. I chop onions and wipe down the counters and change their sheets and do their bedtime routines. In the context of Mike's illness, frequent moves, and the uncertainty of our future, it does feel at times as if we are in the wilderness. 

I labor to make our family's center hold. Pete, the chaplain at the cancer institute, told me once that none of it is wasted. That made me cry. I listened to an old interview with Marie Howe last week and she talked about being a teenager and taking St. Theresa's advice to heart while she submitted to her father's harsh punishment, picking up cigarette butts in the yard: make every task a prayer. Do everything as if it were a prayer, offered up. Wash this dish, tie this shoe, replace this roll of toilet paper: carefully, intentionally, with love.  

I think it is possible, and even probable, that these daily labors are holy acts and that I can understand them as such. I want to hold that truth close, while also acknowledging that just because it is holy and never-wasted does not mean it isn't Hard As Heck. Holy usually travels with hard, I guess.

Back to Beatrice, on the rug. I didn't cry; I didn't run. I didn't correct her and tell the teachers that she never went to the Berkshires. I let her tell her own story, and I stayed as long as I could. Then I apologized and said we had to go, and she and I went to go pick up Mike, meet up with the kids, and go in to the service. 

This too is a kind of very hard, very holy work that I do that tests me far more than any greasy stovetop (though I despise cleaning a greasy stovetop): the quiet, constant emotional work of being present and steady for my family. 

I used to joke that my feelings get a workout every time I do my job. Being a therapist involves a lot of holding of other people's intense emotions, a lot of feeling-with.

But this? This mothering-in-the-presence-of-cancer is like Olympic training for my feelings. I stay with everyone through the fear, worry, anger, anxiety, grief. My heart breaks with them, for them, alongside them. To be a mother, at least for me, is in part to hold the suffering of my husband and children. (Like a sea turtle holding up the world, or Atlas holding up the sky. Somebody has to do it. It's the unacknowledged, quiet work we all expect women to do.)

And it is also to share myself with them fully: to sing along, to laugh too loud, to make them wait while I talk with friends, to do a little dance, to cook a weird meal, to make things with acorns or write messages to neighbors in chalk on the sidewalk. To embarrass them. Being myself with them is a constant that they can depend on. 

But it sure does wear a person out. Hence the paramount importance of doing what I can to keep filling this fragile teapot. There's time alone, and time with friends, and running, and reading. But there's also the solace and courage I take from the millions of mothers who have walked this path before me, in the face of challenges I can only imagine, in every time and place. Caroline Ingalls, a Syrian mother in a refugee camp, Mary mother of Jesus, my mother, a mother standing on the sidelines down the soccer field from me, looking gorgeous and together and feeling a wreck inside. Marie Howe told a story about the first time she replied to her daughter, who asked why she had to make her bed, because I said so. She suddenly felt the room fill with millions who had gone before her and uttered those same words. They were applauding. Because we said so.

Everything shared, she said, is better.

I think so too.